In November 2018, OSU art history graduate and Stanford Ph.D. candidate Lora Webb moved to Rome to study Byzantine art and manuscripts for two years. But when COVID-19 began to rapidly spread through the country in February and March of this year, Webb had to make a decision: stay put or come back to the U.S. She ultimately decided to remain in Italy.

“It's a pandemic, so it's not like you can outrun it,” Webb said. “It seems like the best way to get out of a pandemic is to just stay in place. That's all you can do. Otherwise, you're going to be in it longer. You're going to run straight into it.”

William Colt Chandler wanted to be a police officer as a child. Now he is using his education from Oklahoma State University – at both the Oklahoma City and Stillwater campuses – and his experience from the OSU Police Department to help others on a day-to-day basis and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As a young kid, I fell into one of the categories of a typical male of wanting to be either a firefighter or a police officer,” said Chandler, now a captain with the OSUPD. “It kind of stuck with me in my teenage years. And then my oldest brother became a police officer.”

Victoria O’Keefe (’12 M.S., ’16 Ph.D.) came to OSU to pursue advanced degrees in psychology. Her time here ignited her passion for research, clinic work and advocacy with indigenous communities. She is now an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Department of International Health, in the Social and Behavioral Interventions Program. Read her story and learn how she is working during the pandemic.

“I bit his hand,” said Dan Wilguess, D.D.S., who then explained why his first dental visit as a little boy went so wrong. “I’m the youngest of three boys, and it didn’t occur to anyone to tell me that this man was going to reach into my mouth. Part of what drew me to dentistry was that no one, child or adult, should be afraid of a dentist.”

When Wilguess enrolled at OSU in 1990, he thought he would follow his father’s path and become a CPA. John Wilguess, Ph.D., taught for 28 years in what is now the Spears School of Business.

“My OSU education fostered a 45-year career in IT and higher education,” said Hassler, a 1972 mathematics graduate. “The technical foundation that I had in mathematics and computer science at OSU launched me on that path.”

“It stands for ‘Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation’ and it is a program in which students apply for a scholarship through the Department of Defense,” he said. “What it entails is they give you a stipend so that you can live. They also pay for your school.”

Dr. Christopher Lehman’s draw to history began as a child. At 13, he took on his first research project after receiving a Christmas gift of a fake newspaper that listed all sorts of events that took place around the time he was born.

“There was a section for the government at the time, and under the president was Richard Nixon,” he said, “But in the space for vice president, the area was blank. I thought it was a typo. The first research project that I took on for myself was to find out if it was really a typo, and it turns out, it wasn’t. I was born in the gap between when Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned and his replacement, Gerald Ford, was sworn in.”

Michael Larson’s interest in geography began when he was an engineering major enrolled in a general education summer class.

“World Regional Geography really opened up the world for me,” Larson said. “It was the first textbook I ever read cover to cover. It was fascinating, and it showed me a different direction that I could go. I had taken drafting courses for engineering. I found that drafting work also fit well with a geography degree. And that was pretty much it.”